20090910

Food Revolution Part V - Dinner Dilemmas

I finally came to a point where I had to admit that we may not have been eating the best foods. I also had been reading about different vitamins and how your body needs them. And that our bodies may not be getting the vitamins that they need just from the children's chewables. But I hated the fight at the table.

"Please eat more food...""If you eat this, then you can have a treat...""Just one more bite""But you haven't even touched your vegetables""I don't think you have eaten enough to be full"

I knew there were some things I needed to accept if my kids were ever going to eat good:

Kids will not starve themselves. If there is food, they will eat it...eventually.

Acquiring a taste may take months and months and months of trying.

Eating at the table is a privilege.

Just licking a food is sometimes the first step.

Encourage quality eating, not quantity eating.

If I don't buy it, we won't see it, and then we don't eat it

Its okay to throw away food

Treats are for Bravery

Kids don't have to eat everything on their plate

They will never eat it if I don't serve it.

So this was a process, one that we took on gradually. It turns out, that I may have been the one holding my family back this whole time. Once I started giving my kids decent food, and then showed them that I expected them to eat it, they did. Truly, it seemed like a miracle.

I was so worried about wasting food, that I was only serving my family food that I knew they would eat. I hated to throw away food, so I would just serve junk. Junk that I had because it was cheap, and not serving good stuff, because I didn't think they would eat it.

Well, now I can see that my motives were all wrong. I was feeding my family to save some money, not grow them up healthfully. I hope nobody was noticing, but I was teaching my kids that money is more important than health.